Google to Be More Like Apple, Update Android Once A Year

Android fans have congratulated Google for iterating the open mobile OS quickly to keep pace with innovation, particularly against Apple’s iPhone OS annual update cycle. The search giant won’t continue releasing major updates at that cycle in the future, admitted Andy Rubin, VP, Engineering, Google. As great as major updates are for consumers, they are not great for the platform as a whole. Google said it doesn’t want to stifle developers by making them update their apps every six months.

So we launched it, and from our internal 0.8, we got to 1.0 pretty quickly, and we went through this iteration cycle. You’ve noticed, probably, that that’s slowed down a little bit. Our product cycle is now, basically twice a year, and it will probably end up being once a year when things start settling down, because a platform that’s moving — it’s hard for developers to keep up. I want developers to basically leverage the innovation. I don’t want developers to have to predict the innovation.

We concur.

Would you be okay with Google updating Android once a year? Sound off in the comments below.

No. Let not stop progress so everyone else can catch up, when everyone else is bastardizing the platform any way they see fit. It you want a custom interface (sense, motoblurry) fine, but don't hold up the rest of the world because a few manufacturers can't get their act together.